Wintermute
by Foxtrot Agent 21
Summary: She can't help but wonder why she was created to protect him when he clearly doesn't need helping. But with the Sole Survivor's deteriorating mental state, maybe she wasn't created to protect him, but rather to save him?


She had never been programmed with anything like human sentience; by the time the Sole Survivor had gotten around to building her he had long tired of machines that believed they were human. So the feelings that she felt now were a surprise to her, an anomaly that shouldn't have been possible. But as she watched the man she was meant to be protecting she couldn't help but _feel_. She couldn't begin to describe the emotions- after all, she had never had them before, nor had she spent any time looking into such trivial matters. All she knew was that they didn't feel good.

To her it didn't make much sense for the man to need a guard such as her when most were too scared to approach him, let alone attack him. The only ones brave enough to do that these days were raiders hyped up on too many chems and the enemies among the former powers in the Commonwealth and beyond that believed they could avenge the comrades that had fallen to him. And all of those were met with quick, brutal death.

From what she had gathered about her master he had made the fears of the Commonwealth his enemy not even a day after he emerged from his mythical Vault. There wasn't a person he had helped in passing that didn't adore him, nor an enemy who didn't fear him. His deeds had ranged from rescuing a lost cat to destroying the Brotherhood of Steel's prized airship, offering a simple place to live in a secure settlement to raiding the Institute itself and leaving it in ruin. There was even some rumor amongst the residents of Bunker Hill of his involvement there, but nothing that had ever been confirmed.

He was a legend to those who knew his name; but to those who knew his mind, or worse, his heart, saw him as the monster he had become. By the time she had been built his most famous exploits had been handled and his companions had abandoned him. He had gone from saving the Commonwealth to maintaining it. While some would appreciate the relative peace the area was now able to enjoy, he couldn't. He refused to.

Maybe he had seen too much conflict to handle peace. Maybe the trauma of losing all of those he loved had broken something in him. Maybe if he stopped… he would never start again. So rather than see the Commonwealth as the decent place to live he had created it to be he saw it as a problem that could be solved if he just kept fighting. So he continued.

He routed the raiders, annihilated the would-be avengers, decimated the rampant deathclaws that scrounged the wild for any life to take, mercilessly massacred the mutant population, until all that was left was what he desired to see. It was at this point that the last of his companions left him.

Somewhere along the line they had all began to fall out of his group of close friends. Some grew weary of the fight, some died, and a few even saw him becoming something he would have fought in the past. Only one had ever dared to confront him about such a thing but she had never gotten the end of that particular story from the Sole Survivor, nor any of his former companions. No one could tell her with any certainty what had happened to the young reporter named Piper…

At some point, she figured he had gotten lonely of travelling alone. So he had made a robot to accompany him on his holy mission. Not her: she wouldn't be made until that robot and the three that followed it were long gone, unable to keep up with the legend's frightful pace. And by the time she was created he had long grown tired of companions. He hadn't even named her. He didn't need to.

She knew what her role was.

But as she stood at the entrance of the most recent raider encampment she couldn't help but question her mission. He had created her to protect him, to watch his back when he couldn't. But what enemy could she protect against when he slaughtered them all without hesitation? She watched him behead a raider with the criminal's own ripper as he fired a revolver into the heart of one that had tried to attack at range.

Already he had killed most of those in the encampment; he had told her to pick off those who tried to run. All that remained were those who had taken chems to ward off their fear and their leader. The Survivor had kept them alive, and she knew why. He let them surround him and even went so far as to toss his gun to the ground, unsheathing his fiery sword of a dubious name.

"C'mon!" he shouted at them; even filled with chems a few raiders jumped back in fear, "You're all going to die here. Might as well die with some honor!"

They charged him more or less cohesively, their animal instincts telling them that any target was easier to take down with numbers. Easier, maybe, but the impossible doesn't become possible just because you throw more bodies at it. And so it proved here yet again. The Survivor weaved gracefully through the remaining raiders, his fiery blade cutting and cauterizing at the same time as he removed limbs and heads in equal measure.

One almost managed to touch him, a lucky strike while the legend was dealing with two raiders with rippers. But as the would-be hero thrust his blade forward a bullet found its way to his skull and his blade felled to the mud uselessly. The shot hadn't come from her, but she knew if she looked hard enough she would see a fedora clad man disappearing back into the night from whence he came. Few could beat the Survivor in a matter of luck.

And so things progressed. He killed until only the leader remained, the underlings forming a circle at his feet. The raider boss was like all other raider leaders: big, loud, and invariably clad in power armor that was armor in name only.

The leader met with a pitiful demise, his remaining leg engulfed in flames and tears pouring from his eyes- though those were evaporated rather quickly when Shiskebab found its way into the helmet and cut short the addict's pleas for mercy.

The Survivor stopped in that position, his blade burning away at the canned corpse under his feet. He stayed that way for so long that something might have gone wrong with him. She took a step towards him to inquire if he had suffered injuries when his head whipped around to face her. She retreated a step.

"Winter," she heard him whisper her name, one a rambling old man had given her some weeks ago.

"Yes, sir?" there was no hesitation in her voice: she was not programmed to show fear.

"Do you know why I fight, why I haven't stopped even when others have told me that I've done enough?" the flames of his blade flickered in his eyes as he stared at her from some hundred feet away. She had quite a few mental health related answers that could have sufficed, but he didn't give her time to answer. "It's because war never changes. War doesn't stop just because the enemy is dead; there is always someone else that is waiting to take their place. War doesn't care about time or feelings, it just keeps going. To stop would be to lose."

Finally, the Sole Survivor wrenched his blade from the corpse of the raider boss. "And I refuse to lose."

Seeing his smile at that moment clarified things for her. She knew what her mission was now. "C'mon Winter, let's see if these raiders had anything of value here," he told her as he turned his back to her and began to walk towards the boss's shack. She knew her role in this artificial life of hers: she would protect him. Not from raiders, or the knights of the Brotherhood of Steel, not the creatures of the Wasteland. _No,_ she thought as she raised her rifle, _I will protect him from himself._

A single shot fired.

A tyrant fell to the ground.

The Commonwealth shook.

"Quite the shot, miss," a smooth voice called out from behind her. She whirled around to see a man and a dog standing not ten feet behind her. How had they managed to get so close? The man had a grim smile on his face as he stared past her, hands on the hips of his blue Vault suit. "Now, I don't think it'll be heard quite around the world these days, but it will definitely change things up around here for quite a while."

"Who are you, Vault Dweller?" she inquired as she eyed the odd duo.

The Vault Dweller gave a small laugh at that. "Vault Dweller, huh? Been a while since I got called that, but it has been a while since I've been this far north after all."

"You're avoiding the question."

"And you're not wrong, miss," the smile never left the blonde's face, and neither did the somber look in his blue eyes. "I've got too many names to count, but I suppose you can call me Jake. I don't expect it to mean much to you."

"Why are you here, Jake?" she grew more suspicious the longer she talked to this man, his vague answers only causing distrust to fill her system.

"Ah, that," finally, Jake lowered his eyes from the Survivor's corpse to glance down at the dog at his side, his smile gone. He squatted down so that he was eye level with the German Shephard and petted the animal as it let out a low whine. "Dogmeat here came to me some months ago while I was visiting New Vegas. Led me here and I picked up the story as I travelled. A story of a man who escaped a Vault as the only one left alive. Of a man who had destroyed the corrupt Brotherhood and defeated an army of robotic men."

The man stood and stared directly at her and the look in his eyes made her take a step back involuntarily. It confounded her why her program would let her feel such things, but there was no mistaking that at that moment Jake looked much like the Sole Survivor had.

"The raiders I met along the way told me stories of a monster of a man that decimated all those he considered threats to his territory. Hell, even as far as away as the Capital Wasteland the raiders whispered of him," Jake let out a chuckle. "He sounded like my kind of guy."

"But I also know his sort. Alone, full of skills, but only used for conflict. Men like that become dangerous. They either become monsters in their own rights, or…"

"Or?" Winter asked, amazed at how this stranger had managed to capture her attention in such a short span of time.

"Or… nothing. Men like that can only be obeyed, or put down," the Vault Dweller stared past her once more and she studied his eyes, trying to identify the emotion his eyes were trying to express. "You did the right thing."

A realization struck her. "But that's not why you came here. You didn't cross the continent to kill the Sole Survivor."

"Sole Survivor, huh? They do like to give them nicknames, I suppose, though that one could have been a bit less obvious," Jake sighed as he stood up once more. "Of course, you're not wrong, I came here for a different reason entirely: I came here to save him."

"Others had tried to save him before you. What makes you think you could have done a better job?"

The man turned his back to her, staring up at the cloudy night sky, a dirty Vault number barely visible on his back. She was lightly surprised at the resemblance it had to her former master's. "Because who can talk to a monster better than a fellow monster?"

}[_]{

Winter left the area shortly after Jake did, leaving only a destroyed raider camp behind her. She never looked back.

Days later, a caravan found the camp. When they returned with what they could scrounge from the corpses they told tales of it. They figured it must have been attacked by a rival gang, but they hadn't found any signs of rival colors or markings among the dead. It was a mystery no one they told could solve. Eventually they settled on infighting and left it on that. The jokes at the tavern that night were of insane raiders making food for the local wildlife.

In fact, by the time the merchants had passed through there was already the signs of scavengers taking their pick from the dead. It worried them a little to have so many creatures gathered in one area, but they figured they could handle it. As long as the big one didn't head their way, of course. One big enough to carry off a grown man without a trail.

Because in the middle of the camp lay a pool of blood without an owner, surrounded by the corpses of the raiders…

}[_]{

 **Just a small thing to show I'm still alive. The name of the android, as well as the title of the story, comes from the mod Wintermute that allows you to create human-looking companions. Like building a robot, but with synths, essentially. Anyway, I always wondered what happens to the characters after we're done with them. There's not a single person who doesn't enjoy killing raiders and the like, so what if our characters felt the same? When all they know is how to kill, what more can they do once we leave them?**

 **Of course, some of our characters turn out better depending on how we play them, so I tried to get that across here. Hopefully I conveyed that effectively and entertained you all at least a little bit.**


End file.
